Book Image

Unreal Development Kit Game Design Cookbook

By : Thomas Mooney
Book Image

Unreal Development Kit Game Design Cookbook

By: Thomas Mooney

Overview of this book

UDK is a free, world class game editing tool and being so powerful it can be daunting to learn. This guide offers an excellent set of targeted recipes to help game artists get up to speed with game designing in UDK.Unreal Development Kit Game Design Cookbook contains everything you need to jumpstart your game design efforts. The lessons are aimed squarely at the artist's field of production, with recipes on asset handling, creating content within the editor, animation and visual scripting to get the content working in gameplay.Unreal Game Development Kit Game Design Cookbook exposes how real-time environments are built using UDK tools. Key features are examined ñ assets, animation, light, materials, game controls, user interface, special effects, and game interactivity - with the view of making UDK technically accessible so users can transcend technique and focus on their creative design process. The book has well prepared recipes for level designers and artists of all levels. It covers core design tools and processes in the editor, particularly setting up characters, UI approaches, configuration and scripting gameplay. It is a technical guide that allows game artists to go beyond just creating assets, and it includes creative, extensive demonstrations that extend on mere functionality.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Unreal Development Kit Game Design Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Making animated textures using particle systems


Particles generally render onto sprites, or cards, or little XY planes. This makes them great as sources for animated textures, which are usually square too. It's sometimes cheaper to render particles to a texture and place the texture in the scene instead of an expensive emitter. We've seen in the second recipe in this chapter that we can use the SubUV of a texture to have frame based animation within a particle system. This time we're going to capture a particle system playing to a video file, and process it back in as a texture card. In the texture import process we can set a special texture type called a FlipBook that will let us cycle the SubUV tiles of a texture just like we can in Cascade, but in the Material Editor. This will allow us to use the particles as a texture to moderate other texture components. Examples where this might be used in a real game are numerous. The effect created in this lesson looks like a turbulent foam. It...